Many things are easier for a woman they say, their success stems from mere gender-based leeway and reservations. What shockingly goes unnoticed is that these reservations are nullified when confronted with all forms of discrimination. Braving these is not for the fainthearted. Enter Suguna, a prime model of resilience and pluck.
It is a soothing evening as Suguna greets us with a striking smile and a warm hug. Her children seem extremely eager to watch their mother give an interview with prowess and humility.
From the tender age of one, Suguna slowly began losing her eyesight. When she was three, kids near her home would never allow her to play as she had completely lost her sight by then. “They would say I’m abnormal and wouldn’t be able to play like them and so would never consider playing with me. That’s when I actually felt bad for losing my eyesight,” she says. However, Suguna’s father was extremely encouraging. In fact, he strengthened her the belief that nothing is ever an obstacle if she really wants to succeed in life. That is when she decided to study as much as she could and become extremely successful in the field of education. “My uncle insisted that my father admit me at a blind school in Pondicherry.” Selling their house at their native place, Mumbai, Suguna’s parents brought her to Tamil Nadu to educate her.
A tutor would teach students in an evening class nearby and Suguna, who did not join school till then would just hide nearby and listen to everything that was being taught – she never wanted to learn from him directly, she recalls. Her quick grasping proficiency from the tutorials made the headmaster at the school proud, and the surprised headmaster welcomed Suguna directly to the third grade.
“It was during my sixth grade when I met my husband Elumalai. I had no idea I would marry him at all, then. He was ten years elder to me then and sort of indirectly proposed to me. I was too young to understand what he said at all and completely ignored that proposal,” a blushing Suguna fondly remembers. From the seventh grade, she joined the girls’ blind school in Trichy and fell sick during her 10th public examination. She was bed-ridden but managed to attend the exams with the help of a teacher. After passing her 12th grade with flying colors, Suguna’s father decided to stop her education due to lack of money and instead decided to teach her what he was good at – weaving and embroidery. Suguna, with the skill of touch, learned that too and her father made sure she picked up everything he could ever teach her.
“When I was asked about my ambition, I would only reply “A teacher,” because every successful person needs a teacher to reach a peak in life and I believe nothing is greater than the job of teaching,” Suguna adds.
And so, at the age of 16, Suguna found herself restless sitting at home for a long time and decided to teach the seventh, eighth and the ninth grade children their school syllabus. In the year 2004, Elumalai found his love after many years and married her. “She is an absolutely ambitious woman. I told her I would support her and remain beside her in whatever she chooses to do. I knew she was intelligent because, at just 10 years of age, she would hit me and teach me my subjects,” he recollects laughing.
After her wedding in 2004, Suguna came up against a huge struggle. The visually impaired Elumalai would sell candies at the Tambaram railway station, Chennai, as that was his job. While Suguna was nine months pregnant, her husband suffered a fall in the middle of the road due to a seizure and that was when she realized that he had hidden that health issue about him. We ask her how it felt to learn something as severe as that, to which she reasons, “He was insecure and afraid to lose me and decided to hide it. When my father asked about this, I asked him to consider what would I have done, had the roles been reversed. That’s exactly why I never considered it a big deal.”
Fearing that it could snowball into a case with the police, none of the Autorickshaws bothered to stop and help the then-pregnant Suguna and her husband. After a while, one of them finally helped her admit him to a private hospital. Exactly a day after her husband was discharged, Suguna gave birth to her baby boy in 2005 who is now in the seventh grade and aspires to become a district collector. Suguna looks back on how without anyone’s help, she would give her infants a bath, which even normal mothers would fear doing.
Her husband could no longer converse and exhibit social intelligence after a major bout of fits, due to which he found it hard to work anymore. Suguna with her 40-days-old baby in hand would just board from train to train selling candies to make a living. In 2007, she gave birth to her daughter Supriya, an ambitious little girl, already contemplating a career as a pediatrician.
“However, things were tense inside of me. With two kids, rent, food and much more, it worried me if this business would ever fulfill our basic needs,” Suguna remembers with a heavy heart. That is when she decided to use the little gold her parents gifted her at her wedding. She says, “I wanted to study English but I was told that studying English in Correspondence wouldn’t be an easy task at all and being a Saurashtrian, I decided to take the language I was the weakest at – Tamil.”
With the help of her husband’s friend, Suguna enrolled into Anna University through correspondence and successfully completed her Bachelor of Arts in Tamil. Following that, she completed her Master of Arts and her B.Ed, all the while selling candies at the railway station. During her last examination, she was asked to pay a fee of Rs.10,000 failing which she would not be able to appear for the exams. Her friends from college pooled money towards this and she successfully passed the qualification of what she always wanted to become – a teacher.
That’s when Maatram Foundation found this dynamo of a woman and decided to give her a job. Within a week, she was called in for a surprise interview at the Mahindra World School and was recruited by the principal to teach the students of the second, third and the fourth grade. She says, “I was anxious at first. I scolded my rather calm husband not knowing what else to do (she laughs). However, the principal loved me and today all the students listen quietly when they know that their favorite ‘Suguna teacher’s class is in session.”
Suguna’s story of vanquishing misery to take on life and all its curveballs is perhaps the best teacher by itself.